The Smearing
of BustamanteThe
Far Right and Anti-Mexican RacismBy JORGE MARISCAL09/01/03

It would be tempting to dismiss the recent
media flap around the candidacy of Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and his membership
in the studentorganization Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano
de Aztlán (MEChA) as much to do about nothing. But for those of
us who have been following overthe last decade the political propaganda
of anti-Mexican hate groups, the controversy indicates just how far the
rhetoric and tactics of theextreme right have entered the media mainstream.

As Bustamante's poll numbers began to rise,
his affiliation with MEChA over twenty-five years ago surfaced as a hot
topic on FOX news. BillO'Reilly used his "No Spin Zone" to do
a spin on MEChA that was straight out of the far right's playbook. According
to O'Reilly, MEChA was a racistand violent organization that hated the
United States and advocated the ceding of the Southwest back to Mexico.
O'Reilly's ideological greatuncle, Rush Limbaugh, had introduced the
topic in mid-August. Lesser neo-con talking heads, columnists, and websites
ran with it and soon thesame charges appeared in otherwise reputable
newspapers and across cyberspace.

In fact, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and the rest
were merely sampling the rantings of their slightly loonier right-wing
cousins. Fueled by rapidly shiftingdemographics, especially in California
but also in the Deep South and Northeast where there are now sizable Mexican
communities, an upgradedform of white fear has been taking shape
for several years. Drawing upon the repetoire of racist images created
by the John Birch Society andother extremist groups during the Cold
War, these new nativist ideologues sense the impending end of their white
privilege.

Writing for the internet newspaper World
Net Daily in 2001 (home to the media conservatives O'Reilly and Joe McCarthy
apologist Ann Coulter)two months after September 11th, Joseph
Farah described a radical Chicano group called "La Raza." According to
Farah: "Activists who seethemselves as 'America's Palestinians'
are gearing up a movement to carve out of the southwestern United States--a
region called Aztlánincluding all of Bush's home state of
Texas--a sovereign Hispanic state called the República del Norte.
The leaders of this movement are meetingcontinuously with extremists from the
Islamic world." The fear of a brown planet so muddles the neo-con mind
that Mexican Americans moveeasily from being radical separatists
to covert al-Queda operatives.

The MEChA student organization has been
a particular obsession of Glenn Spencer, founder and lead storm trooper
for his "American Patrol" and"Voices of Citizens Together." Spencer
has been at the forefront of leading vigilante groups whose stated objective
is to "protect" the U.S.southern border, and he popularized the
idea of MEChA as a "Ku Klux Klan-type" organization determined to take
back the Southwest.

A Washington Times article reported on
Spencer's words of wisdom delivered to a group of conventioneers in Virginia
in 2002: "With hundreds ofMexicans illegally crossing the United
States' southwest border daily, Mr. Spencer said, conflict between the
U.S. Border Patrol and Mexicanauthorities could touch off strikes, protests,
and riots by Hispanic militants in the United States-a combination border
war and civil war that"could happen any day," he said." (Washington
Times, 2/25/02).

The fantasy of MEChA as a key element of
a Mexican American fifth column within the United States found its way
into Republican presidentialcandidate Patrick J. Buchanan 2001 bestseller
The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil
Our Country andCivilization. MEChA, warned Buchanan,
is "a Chicano version of the white-supremacist Aryan Nation...and is unabashedly
racist andanti-American."

When student activists created the MEChA
organization in April of 1969 at a conference at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, it was inthe context of educational reform. Numerous
Chicano student organizations had already appeared as part of an emerging
political consciousnessamong Mexican youth in the United States.
Issues of access to higher education, racism, sexism, economic injustice,
Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers's struggle, and the war in Southeast
Asia contributed to the increase in activism.

Educational reformers decided that MEChA
could serve to consolidate the diverse student groups under one banner.
Today, former mechistasinclude elected officials, teachers, attorneys,
doctors, publishers of business magazines, and heads of corporations. Far
from being exclusionaryand racist, MEChA chapters have been at
the forefront of establishing coalitions with other ethnic groups (including
white folks) on college andhigh school campuses across the country.

One month before the Santa Barbara meeting,
at the First Denver Youth Conference in Denver, Chicanos and Chicanas heard
for the first time the"Plan espiritual de Aztlán." A
plan of action that included demands for bilingual education and appeals
to "love and brotherhood," the "Plan" waspreceded by a lyrical prologue written
by the poet Alurista. As he recounts in the PBS documentary series Chicano!,
Alurista had written theprologue as a poem designed to instill
ethnic pride and hope for the future. Whatever political claims might have
existed in the prologue, theywere imprecise at best.

It is not surprising, however, that the
prologue to the "Plan" is what sends right-wingers into a frenzy. What
the prologue asserts is the basichistorical fact that indigenous and Mexican
peoples inhabited the Southwest before the arrival of the United States.
There is no denying thisimportant detail, and there is nothing
that those who would "seal the border" or foolishly equate MEChA with the
Klan can do to change it.

And so the prologue to the "Plan," a poem
written almost thirty five years ago in a period of increased social activism
and high-flying rhetoric, ispresented as exhibit number one in the
nativists's paranoid attack. One need look no further than the 2001 campaign
for mayor of Los Angeles tofind an early example of the use by Republican
operatives of fringe group slander against MEChA. In that race, candidate
Antonio Villaraigosa, whohad been a member of MEChA as a student,
was similarly tarred and feathered.

Now the far right has trotted out the same
ridiculous charges in an attempt to undermine Bustamante and influence
a democratic election withdistortion and innuendo. Whether or not
one is a Bustamante supporter, what should concern every citizen is that
the hate literature of theextreme nativist right is now required
reading in the FOX newsroom.

Jorge Mariscal is a professor at the University
of California, San Diego, a Vietnam veteran, and a former mechista. He
can be reached at:gmariscal@ucsd.edu